Gates Calls for a Final Push to Eradicate Polio
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Gates Calls for a Final Push to Eradicate Polio 3 Andromeda’s Once and Future Stars 6 Health Chip Gives Instant Diagnoses 8 Secondhand Television Exposure Linked to Eating Disorders 10 Perception of Our Heartbeat Influences Our Body Image 12 Tablet Splitting Is a Highly Inaccurate and Potentially Dangerous Practice 13 Solar Research Instrument 'Fills the Gap,' Views Sun's Innermost Corona 15 Using Cassava to Address Vitamin A Deficiency 17 'Natural' Asymmetry of Biological Molecules May Have Come from Space 19 Extinct Insect Completely Reconstructed in 3-D 21 Pesky Bacterial Slime Reveals Its Survival Secrets 23 What Carbon Cycle? 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McNEIL Jr. Altaf Qadri/Associated Press TAKING UP THE FIGHT A polio awareness campaign poster was posted on the side of a small shop in a village about 110 miles from Patna, India. Bill Gates has emerged as the loudest voice for the eradication of global polio. On Monday, in a Manhattan town house that once belonged to polio’s most famous victim, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Gates made an appeal for one more big push to wipe out world polio. Although that battle began in 1985 and Mr. Gates started making regular donations to it only in 2005, he has emerged in the last two years both as one of the biggest donors — he has now given $1.3 billion, more than the amount raised over 25 years by Rotary International — and as the loudest voice for eradication. As new outbreaks create new setbacks each year, he has given ever more money, not only for research but for the grinding work on the ground: paying millions of vaccinators $2 or $3 stipends to get pink polio drops into the mouths of children in villages, slums, markets and train stations. He also journeys to remote Indian and Nigerian villages to be photographed giving the drops himself. Though he lacks Angelina Jolie’s pneumatic allure, his lingering “world’s richest man” cologne is just as aphrodisiacal to TV cameras. He also uses that celebrity to press political leaders. Rich Gulf nations have been criticized for giving little for a disease that now chiefly affects Muslim children; last week in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Mr. Gates and Crown Prince Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan jointly donated $50 million each to vaccinate children in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Gates and the British prime minister, David 3 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 144 February 2011 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Cameron, announced that Britain would double its $30 million donation. Last month, when the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, went to Washington for the diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke’s funeral, Mr. Gates offered him $65 million to initiate a new polio drive. Twelve days later, publicly thanking him, Mr. Zardari did so. However, even as he presses forward, Mr. Gates faces a hard question from some eradication experts and bioethicists: Is it right to keep trying? Although caseloads are down more than 99 percent since the campaign began in 1985, getting rid of the last 1 percent has been like trying to squeeze Jell-O to death. As the vaccination fist closes in one country, the virus bursts out in another. In 1985, Rotary raised $120 million to do the job as its year 2000 “gift to the world.” The effort has now cost $9 billion, and each year consumes another $1 billion. By contrast, the 14-year drive to wipe out smallpox, according to Dr. Donald A. Henderson, the former World Health Organization officer who began it, cost only $500 million in today’s dollars. Dr. Henderson has argued so outspokenly that polio cannot be eradicated that he said in an interview last week: “I’m one of certain people that the W.H.O. doesn’t invite to its experts’ meetings anymore.” Recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, the influential British medical journal, said via Twitter that “Bill Gates’s obsession with polio is distorting priorities in other critical BMGF areas. Global health does not depend on polio eradication.” (The initials are for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.) And Arthur L. Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s bioethics center, who himself spent nine months in a hospital with polio as a child, said in an interview, “We ought to admit that the best we can achieve is control.” Those arguments infuriate Mr. Gates. “These cynics should do a real paper that says how many kids they’re really talking about,” he said in an interview. “If you don’t keep up the pressure on polio, you’re accepting 100,000 to 200,000 crippled or dead children a year.” Right now, there are fewer than 2,000. The skeptics acknowledge that they are arguing for accepting more paralysis and death as the price of shifting that $1 billion to vaccines and other measures that prevent millions of deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, meningitis and malaria.